The American girl drank three large glasses of Moselle in addition to the dry sherry she had had as a starter with the shrimp cocktail and whatever else she had tucked away in the lounge before dinner, all of which was clearly proving too much for her. She became increasingly voluble and less restrained as the evening wore on although she still seemed in full control of her faculties as far as giving me the widest possible berth was concerned. Which of course suited me very well. I could listen and watch without appearing to do so and without the strain of exchanging politeness for provocation.
Her manner with His Excellency was becoming outrageously familiar and domineering. She would occasionally leave him hanging on a word she had just spoken while she turned to fling another at Major Ossai whom she now addressed only as Johnson. And wonder of wonders she even referred to the Chief of Staff, General Lango, as Ahmed on one occasion. And for these effronteries she got nothing but grins of satisfaction from the gentlemen in question. Unbelievable!
But we hadn’t seen noth’n yet. Without any kind of preamble she began reading His Excellency and his subjects a lecture on the need for the country to maintain its present (quite unpopular, needless to say) levels of foreign debt servicing currently running at slightly more than fifty-one percent of total national export earnings. Why? As a quid pro quo for increased American aid in surplus grains for our drought provinces!
“Have you been reading editorials in the National Gazette lately?” I asked in utter dumbfoundment.
“Yes, Johnson kindly showed me some comments earlier in the week. The editor who I hear is a Marxist of sorts appears to imagine he can eat his cake as well as have it, as we all tend to do this side of democracy. Admiring Castro may be fine if you don’t have to live in Cuba or even Angola. But the strange fact is that Dr. Castro, no matter what he says, never defaults in his obligations to the international banking community. He says to others, ‘Don’t pay,’ while making sure he doesn’t fall behind himself in his repayments. What we must remember is that banks are not houses of charity. They’re there to lend money at a fair and reasonable profit. If you deny them their margin of profit by borrowing and not paying back they will soon have to shut down their operations and we shall all go back to saving our money in grandmother’s piggy-bags.”
“Or inside old mattresses,” added His Excellency whose deferential attitude to this piece of impertinence had given me a greater shock than anything I could think of in recent times. Deference and a countenance of martyred justification. He seemed to be saying to the girl, “Go on; tell them. I have gone hoarse shouting the very same message to no avail.” And them in the context was me.
What I did when the dancing started may need a little background. We left the dinner-table and reconvened in the greater ease of the lounge for coffee and liqueur during which His Excellency and Lou were ensconced in deep and intense conversation on a sofa.
Then suddenly I heard my name. “Beatrice, come and sit here by me,” he ordered patting the sofa on the other side of him. “African Chiefs are always polygamists.” Naturally this was greeted with an explosion of laughter. He seemed a little tipsy to me. “Polygamy is for Africa what monotony is for Europe,” he pronounced into the still raging flames of laughter stoking them recklessly to the peril of the rafters. I think the girl beside him had chipped in “And America!” but I can’t bet on it, such was the uproar.
Before his voice had impinged on my thoughts I had temporarily withdrawn into them while physically appearing to attend to the Commissioner of Works struggling overconscientiously with an almost casual comment from General Lango that our highways break up even as they are being laid unlike highways he had seen in Europe and America and even Kenya. The Commissioner who had obviously been long enough in contact with professionals to have picked up a smattering of their language was explaining to a now inattentive general something about the weight of heavy lorries not being the real problem but rather their axle weight or something to that effect.
At that point a renewed sense of questioning had assailed me and I had withdrawn to attend to it. Why am I here? Why was I sent for? Obviously the reason that had first offered itself that it might have to do with mediating between two old friends (even in the absence of one of them) could hardly stand a chance now. Why was I there then? To meet this American girl and arrange to give her the woman’s angle. That was it! I had been dragged here to wait upon this cheeky girl from Arizona or somewhere. Fine. We shall see!
And then came the master’s voice summoning me to have my turn in the bedchamber of African polygamy!
The first time it happened I was a student in England. My boyfriend had taken me to an end-of-year dance at St. Pancras Town Hall. It was crowded and we eventually had to share a table with someone my boyfriend knew who was already seated with a white girl. After a couple of dances I whispered into Guy’s ear that we should exchange partners out of politeness. After two dances with the white girl Guy went completely berserk. He would withdraw with her to the farthest corner of the huge dance-hall and stay there at the end of one dance waiting for the band to strike up another number. The white girl’s boyfriend danced a couple of numbers with me and vanished altogether. So I found myself dancing with strangers who had come to the party with no girls of their own. I became kabu kaboo, for the first time in my life.
When Guy and the girl finally showed up again at our table during a longish interval and he promptly took off to buy drinks, the girl said to me
in her heavy Cockney as she peered into her handbag mirror to mend her rouge: “Your boys like us, ain’ they? My girlfriend saiz it’s the Desdemona complex. Nice word Des-de-mona. Italian I think. Ever hear it?”
So I was locked in combat again with Desdemona, this time itinerant and, worse still, not over some useless black trash in England but the sacred symbol of my nation’s pride, such as it was. Corny? So be it!
So I threw myself between this enemy and him. I literally threw myself at him like a loyal batman covering his endangered commander with his own body and receiving the mortal bullet in his place.
I did it shamelessly. I cheapened myself. God! I did it to your glory like the dancer in a Hindu temple. Like Esther, oh yes like Esther for my long-suffering people.
And was I glad the king was slowly but surely responding! Was I glad! The big snake, the royal python of a gigantic erection began to stir in the shrubbery of my shrine as we danced closer and closer to soothing airs, soothing our ancient bruises together in the dimmed lights. Fully aroused he clung desperately to me. And I took him then boldly by the hand and led him to the balcony railings to the breathtaking view of the dark lake from the pinnacle of the hill. And there told him my story of Desdemona. Something possessed me as I told it.
“If I went to America today, to Washington DC, would I, could I, walk into a White House private dinner and take the American President hostage. And his Defence Chief and his Director of CIA?”
“Oh don’t be such a racist, Beatrice. I am surprised at you. A girl of your education!”
And he stormed away and left me standing alone on the balcony. I stood there staring at the dark lake and my tears flowed in torrents. I was aware of people from the room coming stealthily to the door of the balcony to have a peep. I did not see them; I was merely aware of their coming and retreating again into their dimmed lights and music. Then I heard bold footsteps on the terrazzo floor of the balcony and Major Ossai’s voice behind me: “There is a car waiting downstairs to take you home.”
7
FOR WEEKS AND MONTHS after I had definitely taken on the challenge of bringing together as many broken pieces of this tragic history as I could lay my hands on I still could not find a way to begin. Anything I tried to put down sounded wrong—either too abrupt, too indelicate or too obvious—to my middle ear.
So I kept circling round and round. Until last Saturday; after my weekly ordeal at the market. Hot and grimy from hours of haggling in the sun and now home and fighting for breath after the steep climb with the grocery up the dizzying circular staircase to the kitchen table I dumped the bags and wraps there in transit as it were to get a cold drink, and never went back. Quite extraordinary. Normally I am very particular about the meat especially which I must wash and boil right away or wash with a dash of Milton solution and put in the freezer. But, after gulping down half of the tall glass of lemonade, I carried the rest under a strange propulsion to the spare bedroom which I had turned into a kind of study and began scribbling and went on right into the night. I was vaguely aware of Agatha’s voice saying good evening at the door at some point but took no special interest in it.
The single idea or power or whatever that flashed through my mind that afternoon as soon as I got out of the traffic into the open stretch between the Secretariat Buildings and the GRA had seized me by the forelock! But although it got me seated it neglected to dictate the words to me because on Monday I had to begin all over again having thrown away all that labour of Saturday and Sunday. But the elation was undiminished. I had started. The discarded pages and the nearly spoilt meat seemed like a necessary ritual or a sacrifice to whoever had to be appeased for this audacity of rushing in where sensible angels would fear to tread, or rather for pulling up one of those spears thrust into the ground by the men in the hour of their defeat and left there in the circle of their last dance together.
My housegirl, Agatha, goes to one of these new rapturous churches with which Bassa is infested nowadays. Her sect is called YESMI, acronym for Yahwe Evangelical Sabbath Mission Inc., and apparently forbids her from as much as striking a match on Saturdays to light a stove. She leaves the house before I am out of bed and stays away all day. Around five she returns looking like a wilted cocoyam leaf and eats bread and cold stew or any odd scrap of food she can lay her hands on or even plain garri soaked in iced water with eight lumps of sugar and a whole tin of milk. I discovered, though, that if I struck the match and lit the stove and warmed up the food she would not be prohibited from eating it. But I made it clear to her from the start that I wasn’t ready yet to wash and wipe the feet of my paid help. It is quite enough that I have to do the weekly grocery at the Gelegele market while she is clapping hands and rolling eyes and hips at some hairy-chested prophet in white robes and shower cap.
But something had happened not so long ago to change our lives and, on this particular Saturday, Agatha must have been so overcome by the sheer power of something else quite extraordinary happening in the house that she set the law of the Sabbath aside and put away the meat, already a little high, and the wilting vegetables. Or perhaps, being no stranger herself to possession, she could recognize it quite quickly in another!
My name is Beatrice, but most of my friends call me either B or BB. And my enemies—that’s one lesson I’ve learnt from the still unbelievable violences we went through—that even little people like me could also rate enemies. I had naively assumed that enemies were the privilege of the great. But no. Here was I keeping quite a few hands busy fashioning barbed and poisoned aliases for me as readily as they were renaming the heroes fallen, as our half-literate journalists say, from grace to grass.
It was quite a revelation, and quite frankly it bothered me for a while, especially the crude insinuations of what our men snigger-ingly call bottom-power. But then I said to myself, what do I care really, why should I ask the world to interrupt its business for no other reason than to find out what one insignificant female did or did not do in a calamity that consumed so many and so much? A little matter of personal pride for me perhaps but so what?
Still there is one account of me it seems I will never get used to, which can still bring tears to my eyes. Ambitious. Me ambitious! How? And it is this truly unjust presentation that’s forcing me to expose my life on these pages to see if perhaps there are aspects of me I had successfully concealed even from myself. Pretentious journalists hoping to catch the attention of the new military rulers created an image of me as “the latter-day Madame Pompadour” who manipulated generals and patronized writers.